regard he would approve of Shakespeare's later blank verse much more than
of his earlier because it is freer and more like conversation. Thus, to
Dionysius, the diction of prose and the diction of poetry approach each
other as a limit.



3. The False Rhetoric of the Declamation School


Later antiquity carried the mingling further in the same direction. As
time went on, the over-refinement and literary sophistication of the
florid school of oratory became more and more powerful. The puritan
reaction of the Roman Atticists in the direction of the simplicity of
Lysias defeated itself in over emphasis and ended in establishing coldness
and aridity as literary ideals. Such a jejune style could never hold a
Roman audience, and Cicero in theory and in practice took as model not
only Demosthenes, but also Isocrates. As Roman liberty was lost under the
Caesars, style very naturally assumed greater and greater importance.
Bornecque has shown that the strife of the forum and the genuine debates
of the senate no longer kept tough the sinews of public speech, and the
orators sank back in lassitude on the remaining harmless but unreal
occasional oratory and on the fictitious declamations of the schools.[98]
In these declamation schools under the Empire the boys debated such
imaginary questions as this: A reward is offered to one who shall kill a
tyrant. A. enters the palace and kills the tyrant's son, whereupon the
father commits suicide. Is A. entitled to the reward? In the repertory of
Lucian occurs a show piece on each side of this proposition. For two
hundred years there had been no pirates in the Mediterranean; yet in the
declamation schools pirates abounded, and questions turned upon points of